Search-driven consumer traffic is an important source of potential online sales. For example, search engines, such as GOOGLE, YAHOO, BING, BAIDU (Chinese search engine) and others, are often used to seek information regarding products, services, or topics of interest. Users may be driven to certain websites based on their rankings in organic search results. Organic search results are listings of search engine results that appear because of their relevance to the search terms rather than being advertisements which may be displayed based on other criteria. Typically, advertisements are displayed on the side of the displayed organic search results as shown on a web page.
For example, a company interested in promoting the sale of high-definition flat-panel televisions via the Internet would aim to ensure that its website or uniform resource locator (URL) was prominently featured by leading search engines among relevant destinations in response to consumer search inquiries surrounding related search terms. Examples of the search terms for the topic of high-definition flat-panel televisions via the Internet may include such search terms as flat-panels, high definition televisions (HDTVs), plasma, liquid crystal display (LCD). The company would hope that if any of these search terms were used, the company's URL would have a high ranking in the search results and thus the company's URL would be displayed higher on the search results list returned by the search engine.
To achieve a high ranking in search results, companies select the relevant search terms that they believe consumers would use to execute online searches for a particular product, service, or informational category. Having selected such search terms, the companies then endeavor to ensure that those relevant terms are effectively deployed throughout the websites in both page content (including page titles, sub-titles or H1/H2 tags, and page body content), associated meta-data (or descriptions about the content, including meta-descriptions, meta-keywords), and other page attributes including in-link text, URL text, and associated document properties.
By deploying selected terms accordingly in a website, search engines are more likely to effectively interpret the nature of the content when crawling and indexing the website for purposes of search engine categorization of the content. In simple terms, when a search engine indexes the site content, it is more likely to recognize the consistent presence of the search terms, and thereby associate the corresponding content and related website or URL(s) with the search terms. As a result, the odds that the corresponding URL(s) would be rendered in response to a search with those search terms are increased. This elevates the website or URL(s) within the search rankings, or a list of rendered URL(s) associated with such searches, and therefore can contribute to an increase in consumer traffic associated with those categories.
Although, search engine optimization has emerged as an important practice, it is still inaccurate and lacks precision, especially with large and dynamic websites. It is often ineffective in improving search engine rankings and search-driven traffic volumes, with respect to relevant products, services, or informational categories. This is because the practice of optimizing organic search productivity, although fairly simple in theory, is complicated to effectively execute. Once relevant search terms have been selected, it can be difficult to identify the corresponding relevant pages and the key locations on pages within a given website to maximize the density of the search terms, particularly if the website in question is large (i.e., containing many pages, documents, and other objects) and dynamic (i.e., frequent changes in website content over time). The task of identifying and optimizing those pages and page locations throughout a large and dynamic website which are relevant to the topic or category in question can pose significant challenges. Deployment of selected search terms on pages and page locations that are not relevant or germane to the topic or category in question would serve no useful purpose, and could in fact cause confusion in the marketplace.